A Wisconsin-based think tank analyzed the impact of private election administration grants on the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, claiming in its newly released report that the donations had a “significant” impact on voter turnout for Democrats.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a think tank and litigation center, requested and received records from 196 of the 216 municipalities that received between $2,212 to $3.4 million in grant funding for the the 2020 election from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a nonprofit foundation funded in part by Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
“This analysis provides convincing evidence that the CTCL grants played a role in increasing turnout for Joe Biden in 2020,” WILL Research Director Will Flanders said in a statement released on Wednesday. “Wisconsin lawmakers should act to ensure local election administration isn’t captured by private money seeking partisan advantage.”
After analyzing the change in turnout between 2016 and 2020 for Democrats and Republicans, WILL found a “statistically significant increase” in turnout in cities that received CTCL grants.
In those cities, Biden received approximately 41 votes more on average in each of 196 municipalities. In comparison, CTCL funding did not increase voter turnout for former President Donald Trump.
Given the number of municipalities in Wisconsin that received grants from CTCL, the potential impact is more than 8,000 votes in the direction of Biden, the report claimed.
According to data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes or 0.6 percent.
The report noted that according to the Amistad Project, an initiative from the Thomas More Society, CTCL’s 20 largest donations all went to cities that Hillary Clinton won in the 2016 election—targeting states such as Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
BY LI HAI
